Anzere - PAST PROJECT

The Anzere personal storage system

Goals

Managing a user's personal data (photos, contacts, music, etc.) without recourse to large-scale, online service providers like Facebook, Google, or Yahoo is a topic of considerable research interest at the moment. A personal approach is attractive from a social point of view because it retains more of a degree of privacy and control, and may be resilient to provider failures due to attacks or insolvency.

The goal of the Anzere system is to preserve a user's personal data by replicating it, and making it selectively available according to the user's preferences, which are expressed as a set of replication policies. The problem is complicated by the limited storage resources on some devices (such as phones), the bandwidth required to replicate data quickly, and the fact that the set of devices involved might change without warning (for example, due to failure, theft, or purchase of new hardware).

Description

Anzere is a storage system which replicates a user's personal data (photos, music, etc.) across an ensemble of physical and virtual devices owned (or rented on demand) by a single user, in the spirit of systems like Cimbiosys and Perspective.

In Anzere, objects are replicated according to policies that do not need to refer to specific devices, but are based on device properties, and the system adapts to the arrival and departure of new devices. Anzere obtains its replication actions by solving a constrained cost-based optimization problem derived from the set of replication policies. In this optimization process, Anzere can also choose to acquire additional storage on-demand from cloud providers if this results in a "better" configuration of the system.

Anzere is built on the Rhizoma platform and includes an overlay network, monitoring infrastructure, ECLiPSe constraint solver, data replication based on PRACTI, and Paxos for consistency. Anzere currently runs on mobile phones (Nokia N810,N900), laptops and desktops, and VMs on PlanetLab and Amazon EC2.